Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern

Series Editors’ Introduction

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [-7], (1) Lines: 0 to 38 ——— 0.0pt PgVa ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-7], (1) series editors’ introduction Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture was a bestseller in 1934, catapulting its author to prominence as an articulate spokesperson for examining different cultural patternings. Her ability to write clearly and aesthetically opened the insights of cultural anthropology to a general audience, even without the kind of exoticizing “free love” titillation that helped make Benedict’s student Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa a bestseller six years earlier. Benedict brought to life the consequences at cultural borders of cultural relativity, both as method and epistemology, while providing a critique of interwar U.S. society that was more implicit but also more comprehensive than Mead’s discussion of other lifeways as providing “lessons.” Popular success is rarely a boon to a professional career. Few anthropologists now know much about Benedict’s work after 1934, except that she, along with Boas, wrote against race in the Nazi years and during World War II. Few of Benedict’s projects other than the description of Japanese ethos(es) were finished or published. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), a bestseller at the time, is remembered, if at all, as a period piece, reflecting a rather naive anthropological effort to advise an American government first combating and then occupying Japan. The influence of this book in the postwar reconstruction of Japan and the ready acceptance of anthropological expertise in the public domain have receded from professional awareness in a more cynical era. On several counts, Virginia Heyer Young’s work redresses the imbalance in remembering Ruth Benedict. First, Young concentrates on the later years, when Benedict herself spoke of the need to move “beyond relativity.” The contemporary challenge to the anthropological concept of cultural relativity from cultural studies, philosophy, and so forth renders it imperative to reexamine the limits of the concept in the thinking of one of its primary architects . Benedict was unwilling to dissolve into nihilism; indeed, she wanted a relativity in understanding cultural difference to ground the comparative scientific study of cultural values, at both the psychological and group levels. Second, the position of the author as a student of Benedict’s in the final years of her life provides readers a personalized access to Benedict’s thoughts and actions as a teaching and senior anthropologist. Feminist scholars will be intrigued by the women’s networks around Benedict. Young has her own take on Benedict as a scholar and mentor, but she is also faithful to her documentary sources (in addition to the class notes she and others preserved, correspondence, and other documents not previously available to scholars). vii Series Editors’ Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [-8], (2) Lines: 38 to ——— * 314.0282 ——— Normal Pag * PgEnds: Pa [-8], (2) Third, there is an enormous documentary labor reflected in the collection of class notes from students in Benedict’s later courses. Although these notes are hardly the polished products Benedict might have crafted them into before publishing them, readers will be able to evaluate for themselves the problems she was grappling with and the emerging nature of her conclusions. Benedict’s story also sheds light on the story of the Columbia department of anthropology of which she was a member for so long. Finally,many of Benedict’s later ideas,such as those on social cohesion and synergy,are remarkably contemporary in tone and insight. She foreshadowed the interdigitation of literary criticism and poetics with ethnographic writing . She used cross-cultural context as a standpoint from which to critique her own society. The later Benedict who emerges from this book is remarkably contemporary and deserving of reexamination, however belatedly. Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray viii ...